Religion and the Rise of Democracy

To say that the roots of modern democracy intertwine somewhere deep between Jerusalem and Athens is to invite a charge of heresy from both directions. The Christian Father Tertullian thrust the two cities worlds apart: 'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Or the Academy with the Church?'1 What could Christian revelation learn from all the speculations of Greek philosophy? On the other hand, what help, asked the rationalist, could human institutions derive from intimations of another, divine, plane of existence? In all its essentials, democracy began with the Greeks; they bequeathed us a term, attached to a specific form of government, which in the twentieth century has caught the imaginations of the Western world in an irresistible grip. Most modern books on democracy acknowledge a semantic, and in some ways a historical, debt to ancient Athens. The 2500th anniversary of democracy - in 1992-3 - was celebrated in a widespread festival of seminars, radio broadcasts, books and articles.2 All are prepared to acknowledge the Athenians' demonstration that a people (however narrowly that term may be construed) can govern itself. Their experiment was confined to two extraordinary centuries following the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BCE. For most of the years between their time and ours democracy became a historical curiosity, observed only as one element of the so-called mixed constitution. The Roman republicans, for example, would admit to democratic aspects of their constitution allowing for tribal assemblies, tribunicial action and some popular voting, but under no circumstance would their senatorial oligarchy contemplate the people governing themselves. The coming of empire would plunge the democratic idea further into the recesses of the Western subconscious, whence it would be brought to light by the flickering candles of a few independent acolytes.